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.For they see Kant s conception of having agood will as a humanly unattainable ideal.So they think that not eventhe best or most virtuous among us would have a good will.We may callthis view good-will perfectionism. Louden expresses a perfectionist viewof the good will, which he distinguishes from virtue, when he writesthat Virtue is only an approximation of the good will, because of thebasic conflict or tension in human wills.Kant s virtuous agent is [only] ahuman approximation of a good will. ²t For roughly the same reason,Korsgaard has claimed that the good will is to be understood as only anideal will, or as a perfectly rational will. ²uBut in contrast to these perfectionists stands a third group of interpreters,whose view can be labeled good-will universalism. They represent theopposite extreme from good-will perfectionists, because they think thatevery rational being must have a good will.Universalists see having a goodwill as a condition of the possibility of being virtuous or vicious, and evenfor having duties.In the words of Höffe, for example, One can speakof duty only when, in addition to rational desires, there are competinginclinations, that is, when there is a bad will in addition to the good will. ²vPaton expressed a similar view: This good or rational will Kant takes tobe present in every rational agent, and so in every man, however much itmay be overlaid by irrationality. ²w²³ In a challenge to the majority view s identification of good will and virtue, Dean argues thatprobably most human beings have a good will, since most are influenced in some way by moral beliefs.See Richard Dean, The Value of Humanity in Kant s Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 97.²t Robert Louden, Kant s Virtue Ethics, Philosophy 61 (1986): 473 89 at 478.²u Creating the Kingdom of Ends, 123 4, 240.Others, who may not explicitly endorse this perfectionistview of the good will, seem also to conceive of the requirement for having a good will as so demandingthat it appears that only a perfect will could qualify. [A] good will is a will which could under nocircumstances form intentions that violated the principle of autonomy, according to Tom Sorell, Kant s Good Will and Our Good Nature, Kant-Studien 78 (1987): 87 101 at 93.Warner Wickwritessimilarly, to have a good will is simply to have a character whose aims and choices are in complete[!] accord with the moral law ; Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans., J.Ellington(Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), lii.²v Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant, trans.M.Farrier (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 142.²w H.J.Paton, The Categorical Imperative, 169.A passage from Kant s Groundwork seems to confirmthis idea, when it is translated to imply that even a scoundrel must have a good will, because he wouldbe, from the standpoint of freedom, conscious of possessing a good will which, on his own admission,constitutes the law for the bad will belonging to him as a member of the sensible world ; Immanuel evil nature, good will 219Kant s emphasis on the radical evil of human nature in Religion maysuggest that the perfectionists have the correct interpretation of his view.A good will, as perfectionists see it, would belong to all and only thosewho are what Kant would have called good by nature.In contrast toradically evil human beings, those with a good will must have a naturalpropensity to good.They would be those who, in a free, noumenal act,incorporate the moral law as the preponderant incentive into the highestmaxim of their characters.As a consequence, they would always complyfully with the moral law.So since experience shows that no human beingsare like this, it should be clear that none of us has such a good will, justas the perfectionists suppose.Still, considering other views Kant expressedin Religion, there may be something to be said in favor of the majorityview, that having a good will is being a good or virtuous person.Evenif we are all evil by nature, we are evidently still capable of convertingto purity of heart, and of embarking on the path of endless progress.Having a good will, and so being virtuous, may well be equivalent tohaving, subsequent to a moral conversion, a pure but still humanly frailheart.Kant did write at least once in Religion, contrary to the perfectionistview, that An evil heart can coexist with a will that is in the abstract [imallgemeinen] good. ²xYet contrary to both perfectionism and the majority view, Kant wrotealso in Religion that for the human being, who despite a corrupted [ordepraved] heart yet always possesses a good will, there still remains hope of areturn to the good from which he has strayed (65/6:44, emphasis added).Here, even those who are evil to the worst degree possible for humanbeings are said to possess a good will.Everyone must have a good will ifwe follow this statement, which supports the universalist interpretation.Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans.H.J.Paton (New York: Harper, 1964), 123/4:455,emphasis added.(But Kant s German sentence here lacks any verb of possession in the emphasizedclause, so it does not actually say that the scoundrel is conscious of possessing a good will.) Wood sinterpretation of Kant s view of the good will is not very far from Paton s.He writes: Kant s viewis that most of us display a rich mixture of good will and evil will, often in ways that entangle evilmaxims with good ones and make it difficult for us even to tell the one from the other. AllenWood, The Good Will, Philosophical Topics 31 (Spring and Fall 2003): 457 84 at 471.Wood sinterpretation accommodates good-will universalism, though he does not present any reason to thinkthat no one could lack a good will
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